1

Environmental History in Australasia Libby Robin1 and Tom Griffiths2

Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history and an

affectionate and competitive cultural solidarity. Their social and political affinity as

British colonies and dominions, and the early unity they felt as regions of ‘Australasia’,

justifies a joint assessment of their environmental history and historiography. This essay

begins with an exploration of their common experience as lands and nations and focuses

on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both

countries. We argue that this privileging of science (especially agricultural science) in

environmental policy — itself a legacy of British imperialism — has given a distinctive

quality to the practice of environmental history in Australasia. But the common, imported

settler experience of these two countries has increasingly found itself exposed to the

long-term influences of very different physical environments and Indigenous

inheritances. We will outline the character of these local cultural and natural determinants

because they ultimately define Australian and New Zealand environmental

historiography as more contrastive than similar, and promise to drive their countries in

divergent directions.

One of the virtues of environmental history is that it has often demanded

categories of analysis other than the nation, so we will begin this article by comparing the

histories of Australia and New Zealand and by scrutinizing the concept of ‘Australasia’.

A short history of ‘Australasia’

At times the Tasman Sea seems the widest body of water in the world. In the long,

sustained history of human migration around the globe, the Tasman emerges as a major

1 Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. libby.robin@anu.edu.au 2 History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. tom.griffiths@anu.edu.au

2

barrier. Over tens of thousands of years, humans made their way through South-east Asia

to Australia and then later swept out across the Pacific in a great clockwise arc. That

circle was not closed until the modern era of European settlement and intensive trans-

Tasman exchange. Consequently, the brief to speak for both sides of ‘the ditch’ (as the

Tasman is affectionately called Down Under) is not as easy as it may appear from ‘up

over’. ‘Australasia’ does not have a strong sense of itself as a coherent region. Apart from

character-building competition between Australia and New Zealand in cricket and wool

marketing, there is a deeper, fiercer nationalist separatism in the identities of what Denis

McLean dubs ‘The Prickly Pair’.1 Australia and New Zealand, writes historian Philippa

Mein Smith, ‘often look like neighbours squabbling over the back fence’.2

The British colonized Australia from 1788 and New Zealand officially from 1840,

but both countries were brought decisively into the realm of European trade and strategy

in the late eighteenth century by the first voyage of Captain James Cook in the

Endeavour (1768-71). Both nations own this particular imperial origin story, although

Australians rarely acknowledge that it was New Zealand rather than New Holland that

captivated Cook. The two lands came to share an oceanic economy, and it was this

Pacific orientation, the assertion of British science and sovereignty, and a relatively

similar settler heritage that united them. Australians have mostly forgotten this early

economic and political dominance of the sea. Their ‘island continent’ was invaded by a

naval power, its first colonial culture of authority was maritime, whaling and sealing

were the colony’s earliest productive industries, and it took settlers a quarter of a century

to cross the first land barrier, the Blue Mountains that hemmed in Sydney. Colonial

The two

countries are very unevenly matched — Australia’s land mass (comparable in size with

the mainland United States) is some thirty times larger than New Zealand’s (though New

Zealand is bigger than the United Kingdom). Australia’s 20 million population is five

times New Zealand’s. New Zealand is inevitably more conscious of Australia than the

reverse. Each has traditionally looked to Britain for trade markets and regal authority and

ceremony, but with their backs to the ditch. Even in the modern era of global travel, the

Tasman is still broad enough to ensure that Australians fly to Britain over Asia (and

formerly voyaged the Suez Canal) while New Zealanders more often fly over the United

States (and their ships sailed the Panama).

3

settlements hugged the coast and were connected to one another by the ocean rather than

the land, like islands in an archipelago. Britain established these ‘limpet ports’ more to

control the sea and its trade routes than the land itself; they were founded as outposts of

international maritime strategy rather than as beachheads from which to penetrate the

continental interior.3

In that first century of European settlement, the eastern colonies of Australia often

looked east across the Tasman. In a recent essay in Australian Historical Studies, Donald

Denoon reminds us that ‘Australasia’ was a significant political and cultural entity until

the end of the nineteenth century, but was disremembered at the time of the federation of

the Australian colonies in 1901. The new Commonwealth retreated to its definition as ‘a

continent for a nation’, and Australia turned its back on the sea and found its national

imaginings in its own interior. In Denoon’s memorable phrase, ‘Australasia became

increasingly British, arid and historical, while Oceania has become increasingly wet,

ethnographic and French.’ James Belich also reminds us of the very real imagined

community that was once Australasia. He describes New Zealand’s non-federation with

the Australian colonies — its departure from ‘its old, Tasman world’ — as, ‘by default, a

declaration of independence, or at least a transfer of dependence’. ‘It also meant’, he

continues, ‘that, on 1 January 1901, New Zealand suddenly became small.’ ‘New Zealand

not only failed to join something new in 1901;’ writes Belich, ‘it abandoned something

old — the Tasman world.’

4

The twentieth century has seen a strengthening of differences between these two

southern nations, in spite of the narrower political convergence of the ANZACs during

and after World War One. ‘Australasia’ died as a term, at least partly because in New

Zealand it invoked the very incorporation the country had rejected. Western Australia did

join the Federation, belatedly, and its population increased fourfold in the 1890s due to

gold rushes. The early parity and intimacy of the Tasman colonies was mostly forgotten

throughout the twentieth century. Australia turned its back not only on the Pacific, but on

its nineteenth-century multiculturalism. The two countries were and are driven in

different directions by contrasting indigenous inheritances, as we discuss below. The

Māori exemplar, which was at times strong in Australian Indigenous affairs in the

nineteenth century, was increasingly replaced by American parallels in the twentieth

4

century.5 The Māori political presence has always been stronger and more institutional

than the Aboriginal. Linguistically, it is making an escalating impact on New Zealand

culture. The language of English develops its local varieties wilfully and everywhere, but

the scale of recent linguistic change in New Zealand ‘seems to be going well beyond the

Australian experience’, in the opinion of George Seddon.6 Politically, the two countries

have charted different courses in their relations with Britain and America, a divergence

that has widened considerably in the last few years.7

As the British and Commonwealth comparative frameworks for Australian history

weakened, Australian historiography became, in the words of Ann Curthoys, ‘more

national, critical, autonomous, and isolated’.

8 But, since the 1980s other comparative

frameworks have emerged that have revived the concept of Australasia. Donald Denoon

and Phillipa Mein-Smith’s recent history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific is a

courageous and stimulating synthesis.9 Curthoys welcomes ‘an international drift away

from national and towards more transnational forms of history’.10 Transnational histories

seek interactions between nations and not just comparisons between them, and

environmental histories have contributed vigorously to this mapping of movements and

influences, often across and at the edges of empires. Scholars such as J M Powell,

Stephen Pyne, Tom Dunlap, Richard Grove and Ian Tyrrell have given new life to the

historiography of Australasia with settler society parallels and global narratives of

species, cultures and ideas.11 Environmental historians also revive ancient physical and

biological connections between lands and thereby help to bring Australasia back into

intellectual play. Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters: An ecological history of the

Australasian lands and people (1994), studied a ‘family’ of ‘new lands’: New Holland,

New Zealand, New Guinea and New Caledonia.12 The Royal Australasian Ornithologists’

Union (RAOU) recently defined the region for its journal, Emu, as the Southern

Hemisphere ‘from the Indian Ocean to the mid-Pacific, including Antarctica, Indonesia,

New Guinea, Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia’. This was more or less consistent

with the original vision of the first Emu team in 1901, which defined Australasia as the

lands east of Wallace’s line.13

Comparative environmental historians gazing both ways across the Tasman must

relish the long-term experiment in the relations of history and ecology that their two

5

countries furnish: here they are, side by side at the bottom of the world, with strikingly

different geologies and ecologies, contrasting Indigenous inheritances, and modern,

compressed settler histories which, although distinct, have overwhelming similarities.

What happens to humans when they try to possess such different lands? How do social

time and deep time infiltrate one another in these two countries? How do their histories

interact with their ecologies? These are questions that are increasingly animating any

consideration of environmental history in ‘Australasia’.

Southern ecological experiments

As Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking explore in their Environmental Histories of

New Zealand, their country has long attracted international historical and geographical

attention as a kind of ecological and social laboratory. In 1941 the New Zealand

geographer, Kenneth Cumberland, observed that ‘What in Europe took 20 centuries and

in North America four has been accomplished in New Zealand within a single century’.14

The Canadian historical geographer, Andrew Hill Clark, wrote about ‘revolutionary

change’ in The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals. United States

historian Alfred Crosby devoted the longest chapter in his Ecological Imperialism to a

case study of New Zealand.15 New Zealand historian, James Belich, observed in Paradise

Reforged that it is the speed, not the length, of New Zealand history that makes it

remarkable — and hence traumatic. These southern settler societies share a place in

European imperial history, as new territories incorporated into the capitalist world

economy ‘using the panoply of people, animals, plants, and, less intentionally,

pathogens’.16

Australian and New Zealand histories are both like giant experiments in

ecological crisis and management, sometimes a horrifying concentration of

environmental damage and cultural loss, and sometimes a heartening parable of hope and

learning. Such roller-coasters of environmental history make us more sensitive than the

rest of the world to many ecological matters. In the Tasman worlds, we can never blithely

assume the dominance of culture over nature, nor can we believe in the infinite resilience

of the land. We are committed by history and circumstance to an intellectually bracing

environmental enquiry.

6

The twin stories of acclimatization and pests have dominated Australasian

environmental history and have also generated attention to the history of extinctions.

Since the European settlement of Australia, for example, eleven terrestrial mammals have

become extinct, five have disappeared from the mainland and survive on offshore islands,

and fifteen more have declined dramatically. Steve Morton has described the loss as

‘catastrophic’ and his role as a CSIRO ecologist working in Australia as akin to that of an

ambulance driver arriving at the scene of a bad accident.17 The rate of mammal

extinctions in the Australian rangelands is the highest in the world. In New Zealand in the

same two centuries, there has been an 85% decline in wetlands. Europeans regarded as

useless and primeval the very landscapes — the coastal lowland forests dominated by

that great tree, the kahikatea — that Māori considered among their most productive.18

Australia and New Zealand share a doubtful reputation as the greatest users of 1080

poison in the world.19 British settlers wanted to transform these lands, tame them, make

them like ‘home’. Historian W. K. Hancock observed that the word ‘improvement’ was

an early immigrant to colonial Australia. In its usage, he wrote, ‘we hear intonations of

nostalgia: improvement of “the new country”, it seems, means doing everything that a

man can to make it look like “the old country”‘.20 ‘Improvement’ was nostalgic; it was

dismissive of indigenous environmental systems; it was aggressive as well as progressive.

This nostalgia also had social and moral dimensions: ‘improvement’ very often meant the

settlement of an idealized yeomanry, of self-sufficient family freeholders. Colonists

wanted to see small fields carefully tilled. And so ‘improvement’ especially meant

clearing. One historian of New Zealand, writing in 1909, described the assault on the

forests as a “pitiful war”.21

Two landmark books, one from each side of the Tasman, illustrate the fascination

that Australasian environmental history has with the moral and scientific dimensions of

the ecology of invasion. Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station by Herbert

Guthrie-Smith was first published in 1921, and most recently republished in the United

States in 1999. It has introduced many distinguished outsiders (such as the American

historians William Cronon and Richard White) to New Zealand and many New

Zealanders to environmental history. It is also an enduring piece of nature writing that

makes a southern geographic edge a moral and human centre.

22 The book offers a record

7

of environmental change ‘noted on one sheep-station in one province’. It is self-

consciously and bloody-mindedly ‘a microscopic canvas’. Every creature, every living

thing animated by sap or blood or movement, is a character in the story and an agent in

history. Animals are called ‘pioneers’, swine are surveyors, alien plants are ‘self-invited

strangers’, sheep are the chief remodellers of the run, and weeds are wayfarers: Guthrie-

Smith lovingly records about forty plants that determinedly made their way to his

property, Tutira, by pedestrianism. These plants, he writes, have not been ‘too proud to

have accepted from time to time a short lift on a roadman’s shovel, the warm shelter of a

stomach, the grip of a mane or pastern, a brief trundle on the wheel of a dray or buggy,

the hospitality of a friendly hoof or woolly shank, the assistance downhill of a brimming

water-table.’ His rampant and unapologetic anthropomorphism is balanced by his

mischievous zoological eye on humanity. Guthrie-Smith explains that: ‘The early failure

of homo sapiens on Tutira, his ultimate acclimatization, has been noted, as far as may be,

in terms of the weasel or rabbit; he has been treated without fear or favour as a beast of

the field.’23

And so Tutira is a story of epic dimensions. The people appear alongside the other

creatures, sometimes consciously in league with them, sometimes oblivious to the drama

beneath their feet or in the grass and trees around them, the humans caught unawares in

natural cycles and revolutions in which they are merely bit-players. It is this human

struggle for environmental consciousness, for some understanding of the ecological

context and consequences of their actions, that supplies the moral dimensions of the

book. The author tells us what he sees and what he has done, but he also tells us what, for

a while, he did not know he was doing. No wonder that Tutira has been repeatedly seized

by historians of settler societies as a parable: it exemplifies one of the great themes of

imperial history. Guthrie-Smith dramatizes the agency of what Crosby called ‘the

portmanteau biota’; he shows us the stealth and complicity of plants and animals, and

their use of humans.

Sixty years after the publication of Tutira, an Australian farmer and writer, Eric

Rolls, also wrote about the land he had worked and lived upon. It was during the late

1970s that Eric Rolls wrestled with words and weeds in order to produce his literary

masterpiece, A Million Wild Acres, a book that deserves to be put on the shelf beside

8

Tutira. A Million Wild Acres is the story of the land Rolls farmed in northern New South

Wales, the Pilliga Scrub, and of the way — over the 200 years since European settlement

— a dense, wild forest grew where once, in Aboriginal times, there had been open

wooded country that attracted the pastoralist’s eye. Like Guthrie-Smith, Rolls is both

pastoralist and ecologist, producer and conservationist, improver and philosopher — and

historian and farmer. ‘[O]ne nearly gets torn in halves sometimes trying to lead two

lives’, Eric Rolls exclaimed. But he also knew that ‘Without the farm there would have

been no book, even if it delayed publication.’24

Eric Rolls is fascinated by the meaning of the word ‘wild’. It is often used to

describe nature that is seen to be untouched and pristine. But for Rolls, ‘wild’ nature is

feral, mongrel, hybrid nature, nature stirred up, nature enlivened by human presence and

intervention; it is dynamic, historical nature. So the new forest that he grows in the pages

of his book — the forest that he recognizes as a creation of European settlement — is

‘concentrated’ and volatile. Like Guthrie-Smith, Rolls is fascinated by the invaders, the

cattle, rabbits, foxes, their adaptability and sheer vigour even as they wreak damage. But

Rolls’s optimism challenges the traditional contrasts of European settler thinking about

nature. It revolutionizes those assumptions that disturbed nature is somehow always

lesser nature. He wrote that: ‘Because of the intensity of our modern forests they are

more precious than remnants’. ‘They do not display the past as it was, they have

concentrated it’.

Guthrie-Smith would have said the same.

25 Such positive, historical views can disturb aspects of the green

movement. At the same time as recognizing the fragility and integrity of native

ecosystems Rolls wants to acknowledge the creative ecology of invasion. This relish for

the fecundity of life and an irrepressible optimism also underpin Rolls’s joint advocacy of

the causes of nature conservation, on the one hand, and human immigration to Australia

on the other.26

Extermination of ‘pests’ and eradication of ‘weeds’ have been entrenched in the

combative environmental discourses of both countries.

He is determined to see the creativity of encounter, of humans as much as

any species. History and ecology are irretrievably entwined in his politics.

27 The American geographer,

David Lowenthal, has questioned these doctrines of ‘ecological purity and environmental

chauvinism’, and sees them as an over-reaction against colonial Eurocentric preferences.

‘But indigenous purity is neither possible nor desirable’, he argues: ‘Nature and culture

9

alike generally benefit from creative intermingling.’28 In a recent essay, visiting North

American Thomas Isern has raised similar issues for New Zealand. He has reflected

practically and philosophically on what the history of New Zealand’s introduced pests

and weeds tells us about future environmental management. Isern overturns the common

expectation that land, if abandoned, will heal itself, and he brands this view as ‘a passive-

green approach to environmentalism’.29 He warns against a ‘bellicose, national-security

rhetoric that pits virtuous natives in moral contest against an evil empire of alien

invaders’. Isern argues instead for traditions of ‘moderate, responsible human

engagement with nature’.30

One of the reasons why Tutira appears so nationally emblematic is that it was

written at the end of those transformative decades in New Zealand environmental history

— 1880 to 1920 — when ‘the farm landscape was largely created’. By the 1920s and

30s, writes Michael Roche, the ‘war against nature’ initiated by the nineteenth-century

improvers and clearers simply continued, only now it was a fight, literally, ‘to hold the

land’, to possess it, but also to stop it from blowing away.

31 The great New Zealand

geographer, Kenneth Cumberland, found this watershed in his own memories — looking

back from the late 1970s, he remembered a New Zealand of the late 1930s that was riding

high on international economic indicators, yet which (to his newcomer’s eye) proliferated

with environmental problems. He could see that ‘the fillip that refrigeration and a

continually expanding British market had brought was running out’. During a tour in

1941 he met farmers who admitted ‘serious losses of soil off the slopes’ of their runs.

One talked ‘of daylight being shut out for hours on end by dust storms’, of dust invading

the homestead, of wind stripping the surfaces off the high terraces. He photographed a

half-buried fence that had two others vertically below it, one on top of the other. He

visited Ruatoria in the North Island, formerly Manutahi, a Māori town. ‘Ruatoria has a

dairy factory’, he recorded in his diary in 1941, ‘but production is sharply down. Some

blame the new family benefits; others the Māori character. None think of soil erosion.’32

In Australia the 1930s were a time of reckoning, too. There were great changes in

attitudes to Aboriginal people: entrenched racism was challenged by Aboriginal activists,

white humanitarians and anthropologists, Aboriginal art and material culture gained in

value; and Aborigines, it was realized almost with a shock, had ‘survived’, or at least

10

could be ‘preserved’ if proper action were taken by white Australians. The long reality of

Aboriginal antiquity began to dawn on white scientists. And, after a century of white

settlement, the very land itself seemed to be biting back. Dust storms engulfed eastern

Australia, and Australian soil famously bridged the Tasman, painting New Zealand’s

snowfields pink. Thus the Gondwanan earth of Australia and New Zealand met again in

the stratosphere when the two lands shared the global erosion crisis of the ‘dirty thirties’.

Two dramatic events each side of the Tasman encapsulated the crisis. In 1938 disastrous

floods and soil erosion engulfed the Esk Valley on the North Island’s east coast, and in

1939 the Black Friday fires bared soil and killed trees and people across 1.4 million

hectares of south-eastern Australia. The European settlers of both countries wondered

what their own imported civilization had unwittingly unleashed.

This was the context into which several editions of Tutira were released, and it is

the series of prefaces written by Guthrie-Smith — in 1921, 1926 and 1940 — that chart

the evolving sensibilities of the author. Tutira superbly exemplifies the opening phase of

the grasslands revolution, the transformation of the island ‘from mostly rainforest to

mostly grass’, a revolution that entered a new, chemical phase with increasing scientific

management.33 As a pioneer pastoralist, Guthrie-Smith had happily imagined the building

of the wool-shed with its backdrop ‘smoothed in green grass, lawned like Arcadia’.34 By

1940, sobered by the passing of years and the poverty of grass, he offered in his new

preface to Tutira ‘the melancholy musings that perplex a sheep-farmer in concern for his

soul’. The question he tortured himself with was: ‘Have I then for sixty years desecrated

God’s earth and dubbed it improvement?’35 In a later book he confessed that although he

sometimes plumed himself as a superpatriot because he had made a ‘thousand blades of

grass’ grow where less than none had been before, he mostly felt that the same

achievement deemed him ‘unfit to live’.36 Guthrie-Smith’s tone is apocalyptic — to use

John MacKenzie’s descriptive term for much environmental history.37 Tutira makes a

resonant parable of ecological imperialism because of its author’s emotional

ambivalence. He writes, for instance, that ‘In the landing of Cook … were contained the

seeds of death’ — but he also anguishes over personal responsibility.38 In his affectionate

attention to his tract of country and his respect for Māori lore, Guthrie-Smith wants to

understand the land even as he transforms it. This is the emotional angst of the pioneer

11

and the irony of settlement. ‘A settler’, Guthrie-Smith tells us, ‘gives his best love not to

his parents, not to his wife, not to his little ones, but to his land.’ And this love changes

him. He reflects that in youth ‘a man may possess land, in later life the land may possess

him’.39

His relationship to his farm was not just economic and literary: he acknowledged

Tutira’s ‘full incorporation of him, body and soul’. Yet these words were written by a

man who still called Britain ‘home’.

Colonial science and strange environments

The histories of science and environment are entwined closely in Australasia. In

1788, the year Arthur Phillip hoisted the British flag in Sydney cove, the London

scientific elite launched the Linnean society. The Australasian colonies were the first

major ‘post-Linnean’ settlements, and they were deemed ‘curious’ places.40 International

natural history looked with interest on the strange lands in the Australasian colonies.

Much biological and geological material was sent back to London and other great

European centres to be classified and accommodated into pre-existing European

classification systems. During the nineteenth century, scientific centres and societies were

established in the colonies, beginning precariously with Sydney’s first botanic garden in

1816, followed by a Philosophical Society (1821) and a museum (1827). ‘Scientific

authority over Australian and New Zealand materials’, as Rod Home has commented

however, ‘remained firmly based in Europe’.41 Eurocentrism in understanding nature has

continued well beyond the colonial era, as George Seddon has argued persuasively.42

Gold rush fever broke out in eastern Australia in 1851, spreading to New Zealand

and finally to Western Australia in the 1890s. The news of gold brought a massive influx

of population, including educated arrivals who actively promoted local science for

colonial prosperity, including botanic gardens, natural history museums and astronomical

observatories. Mining was seen as a key to development in both Australia and New

Zealand. Alfred Selwyn (from the Geological Survey of Great Britain) undertook the

Geological Survey of Victoria from 1852—1868, and trained many of the government

geologists for other colonies. In New Zealand, Julius Haast was geologist in Canterbury

and James Hector in Otago, before Hector transferred to Wellington to direct the

Geological Survey of New Zealand in 1865.

43 By the 1860s, scientific societies were

12

flourishing in all colonial centres promoting the application of science to local

environmental issues, some of them arising from mining operations. The protection of

Melbourne’s water catchments was debated at length by the experts of the Philosophical

(later Royal) Society of Victoria in the 1850s and 1860s. Colonial botanical gardens were

experimental places for acclimatisation in all settler societies, and Australasian ones

especially.44 These early scientists were often called on to have a great breadth of

knowledge, which was ideal for considering environments from many perspectives.

Hector, to take an extreme example, was not only director of the Geological Survey in

Wellington, but also the Colonial Museum and Colonial Laboratory. He later took

responsibility for the Meteorological Department, the Colonial Observatory, the

Wellington Botanic Garden and the Patent Office Library!45

The 1880s saw an expansion in colonial universities and government scientific

institutions that attracted more professional scientists. The Australasian Association for

the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was established in 1888 as a major intercolonial

scientific initiative, modelled on the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

AAAS (later titled ANZAAS from 1930 until its abolition in 1997) provided an annual

opportunity for senior members of the scientific community in Australia and New

Zealand to meet and discuss issues of mutual interest. As well as acting as a showcase for

new scientific ideas, its meetings were actively concerned with the place of science in

‘new lands’, including the protection of the flora, fauna and avifauna of the region. From

the start AAAS exercised its position and good media coverage to draw public attention

to the poor state of biological knowledge in the region and the rapid depletion of its

biological resources, including plants, animals and birds.

Such appointments set an

early pattern on both sides of the Tasman for close relations between science and

government, something that continued for most of the twentieth century.

46

Science for settling

While settler-farmers battled with the lands of southern latitudes, their

governments struggled to find ways to show support for the yeoman farmer ideals

brought from elsewhere, and largely unquestioned as the way to tame and settle these

‘strange’ places. By the twentieth century, the mission of government science had

13

changed to ‘improving’ the country, especially the pastures and stock, and solving the

emerging environmental problems of settlement. William Farrer was keen to enthuse the

new Commonwealth government about supporting the sort of experimental work he had

been doing on his own property at Lambrigg for agricultural improvements. In 1902, in a

strategic stroke, he named his new ‘rust resistant’ wheat variety ‘Federation’ to cement its

relevance to the emerging nation.

At the same time in New Zealand, Leonard Cockayne was advocating

government-backed experimental plant research stations for New Zealand, using his own

experimental garden Tarata, established near Christchurch in 1892, as an exemplar.

Although his early activism was as an acclimatizer and horticulturist, Cockayne quickly

gained authority as an expert on the native vegetation of New Zealand.47 Cockayne’s

local and international standing made him a strong local voice for both science and the

environment in New Zealand.48 In his 1908 report on Tongariro National Park, he

defined ‘scenery’ to depend not just on the reservation of volcanic landscapes but on the

protection of ‘the combinations of plants which form the garment’, noting that ‘in New

Zealand …the vegetation is unique’.49 In the 1920s he was a strong supporter of the new

national government science organization, the Department of Scientific and Industrial

Research (DSIR). He also advocated a Native Plant Museum in Wellington.50

Australia and New Zealand both established large and prominent government

scientific organizations in 1926. Government science was critical to shaping

understandings of environments in both places, and the expenditure was explicitly

justified on these grounds. A flagship division of Australia’s Council for Scientific and

Industrial Research (CSIR, since 1949, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial

Research Organization or CSIRO) was Economic Entomology. The study of insects

(pests and friends) emerged as an important new area for government science in the wake

of Australia’s most politically successful ‘applied biology’ story, about the biological

control of the weed, common prickly pear Opuntia stricta var. stricta. A stem-boring

moth Cactoblastus cactorum introduced from Argentina to consume the unwanted

prickly pear plants led to the recovery of between ten and 25 million hectares of brigalow

country in New South Wales and Queensland. The moth ate through something like

14

10,000 tonnes of prickly pear in the four years between 1926 and 1930.51

CSIR and New Zealand’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research

(DSIR) also both took advantage of what Michael Worboys called the ‘defensive

imperialism’ of interwar Britain, when the Empire was evolving into the Commonwealth.

Britain linked Commonwealth economics and trade to developing biological sciences in

and for the dominions. Sciences that would build primary industry were actively

sponsored through the activities of the Empire Marketing Board.

Government

wanted to be part of such stories.

52 Within both Australia

and New Zealand political leaders were convinced that science could render valuable

service in developing their economies, and the ‘matching funds’ offered by Britain

created an opportunity not to be missed.53

New Zealand’s extraordinary ‘grasslands revolution’ was led by determined

science (agrostology) that turned a mountainous, forested land into pasture suitable for

wool-growing and dairying. As Peter Holland, Kevin O’Connor and Alexander Wearing

argue, grass was at the heart of New Zealand’s scientific and technological effort,

shaping a new society.

CSIR and DSIR both studied some indigenous

flora and fauna, but the overwhelming drive for usefulness to agriculture was such that

the species chosen were (and to some extent still are) ‘pests and weeds’ to development

rather than indigenous plants in undisturbed habitats. Relevance to economic imperatives

was a necessary precondition for government support.

54 This legacy continued for most of the twentieth century. Tom

Brooking, Robin Hodge and Vaughan Wood noted that as late as the 1980s, the political

preference for agricultural grasslands was overpowering, despite the fact that 51%

grasslands was well above the world average of 37%.55

Pests and weeds interfered with the grand agricultural project and became central

to science on both sides of the Tasman. The topsoil was vulnerable, and being lost

dramatically from the denuded semi-arid lands put to pastoral service in Australia. The

mid-1930s saw soil erosion crises in Australia and the United States, the famous Dust

Bowl of the American Midwest. While Americans called on a distinguished local

ecologist, Frederic Clements, from the Carnegie Institution to lead a well-funded

The land’s ecological needs were

simply overwhelmed by the mutually supportive elements of the ethic of industrial

agriculture and the cultural practices of government science for the nation.

15

investigation into the problem, Australians gave the task to a relatively junior British

applied biologist, Francis Ratcliffe, an employee of the Empire Marketing Board. The

young animal ecologist had no particular expertise in soils or plants, and only a brief

experience of Australia itself, through his CSIR work on fruit bats in Queensland. But

soil erosion could not be handled like a ‘pest’. It demanded more than just ecology,

although the rabbit pest certainly contributed to erosion on both sides of the Tasman.

Ratcliffe, a good listener and a gifted writer, went beyond science and sociology, and

provided Australia with some uncomfortable truths. Not only did he provide advice to

government, but wrote his report as a popular biological ‘adventure story’ Flying Fox and

Drifting Sand, which was prescribed reading in Australian high schools. In it he declared:

‘The fodder reserve of the semi-desert country is nowhere sufficient to stand up

indefinitely to the strain that must be placed on it by pastoral settlement’.56

Flying Fox and Drifting Sand inspired some important government-backed soil

science. Vegetation mapping in key watershed areas, part of the soil surveying methods,

raised controversial issues about protecting vulnerable indigenous grasslands.

The problem

was pastoral settlement itself and its mismatch with the local ecology.

57 The issue

of rabbits (and government anxiety about them) frustrated Ratcliffe personally, when he

became officer-in-charge of the CSIRO Wildlife Section in 1949, and he found he had

hardly any resources for work on any animals apart from rabbits, but the nation badly

needed a full biological survey. 58 In the DSIR in New Zealand too, ‘work on rabbits was

the bread and butter of the Ecology Division in the 1950s.’59

So much government science focused on development yet, paradoxically, many

champions for the environment were government scientists. Ratcliffe and Cockayne were

not alone in exhorting restraint, and both used their considerable writing skills to this end.

Cockayne’s The Vegetation of New Zealand concluded with an impassioned plea for

sanctuaries where ‘plants, the survivors of that bitter strife with Nature, that commenced

millions of years ago can still pursue their destinies if unmolested by their human

enemies and the horde of foreign plants and animals he has let loose.’

60 Scientific leaders

continued to claim government funding on the basis of science's role for in developing

both nations, so calls for environmental restraint were unpopular. Dead rabbits were clear

signs of ‘progress’, value for expenditure by tax-payers on science, but when science

16

suggested giving up pastoral possibilities or valuable land for the sake of plants, whether

they be saltbush or beech forest, it appeared to be reaching beyond its brief.61

Governments welcomed clear scientific definitions of problems and instant solutions.

They were less comfortable with scientists who called for social and environmental

balances, for longer-term planning and incremental solutions in the interests of non-

human species. Right up to the present, Australasian science contributes so significantly

to how we know environments— both in terms of development and restraint — that it is

often natural scientists that have encouraged the interdisciplinary and social logic of

sustainability. Science is not just the subject of much environmental history, in

Australasia it is often scientists who are writing it, because they perceive its potential to

contribute to sustainability.62

Environmental history and sustainability

In the first issue of Environment and History, Michael Redclift argued that ‘the

view we take of the environment is closely bound up with the view we take of science’.63

But ecological sustainability, he commented, also needs social sustainability, so the

sustainability of the environment should not be regarded as a ‘scientific problem

…amenable to [a] scientific answer’, but rather something that demands consideration of

human purpose. A ‘pragmatic’ environmental history that advances the cause of

sustainability has been regularly advocated in the Australian context, most prominently

by Stephen Dovers.64 Dovers sees ‘the potential of environmental history to inform

contemporary challenges of sustainability and resource and environmental management’,

as something that can add value to ‘policy and institutional tasks and problems’, and that

this potential may also be essential to the ‘vibrancy of environmental history’ itself.65

This argument, while having independent merit, in fact reflects the historical

origins of environmental history in Australia. Far from needing to add ‘relevance’ to

existing historical scholarship, much Australasian work emerged out of a need for

scholarship in sustainability, and only later found its way towards history, or at least

historical science. Like Australasian science, arguments for environmental history are

frequently based on the need for relevance to government-driven initiatives and policies.

For example, the search for baseline vegetation communities that could inform debates

17

about regrowth and fire, or stream-gauge measurements that benchmarked changes in

river flows encouraged biologists and hydrologists to try their hand at history. Soil

erosion and its historical origins drew geomorphologists into the realm of historical

documents.66 Much of the environmental history literature of the past couple of decades

has come from outside history. Despite the fact that the large continent of Australia has

vastly more desert than forest cover, the strength of and enthusiasm for forest history has

meant that the literature of forests has overshadowed all other environments. Forest

history literature itself has focused overwhelmingly on the temperate forests of the south-

eastern states.67 And because most forests are State-owned, the policy and institutional

dimensions of their management have been prominent. In the five published Proceedings

of the Australian Forest History Society conferences, issued between 1988 and 2002,

only eight of 152 contributors came from history departments in Australian universities,

but over a third of contributors (52) came from government agencies or provided

consultancy services to government.68

The pattern of dominance by writers with an interest in historical policy, but no

formal training in history or historical geography, is the same in the two Australian

environmental history collections published by Oxford University Press and edited by

Stephen Dovers in 1994 and 2000. Of 23 contributions, only two were written by people

working in university history departments.

69

In ten years, Environment and History has published material on Australian

environmental history in every volume, a total of 17 articles, including the special

Australia issue, volume 4(2) in 1998, edited by John Dargavel.

This contrasts sharply with Oxford’s

Environmental Histories of New Zealand (edited by Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking in

2002). In the case of the New Zealanders, the subjects of study in environmental history

were frequently scientific or technical, but the perspectives of the contributors more

clearly historical or geographical (16 of the 21 contributors identified as academic

historians or geographers.)

70 Before Paul Star’s 2002

paper on ‘Native Forests and the Rise of Preservation in New Zealand (1903—1913)’,

New Zealand’s environments were not touched on by Environment and History. It has

made up rapidly since, with a total of 12 papers appearing by the end of 2003, including

the special issue New Zealand, volume 9(4) edited by Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson.71

18

In addition, Otago-based historian, Judith Bennett contributed two pioneering papers on

forest industries in Oceania (Solomon Islands and Fiji) in 2000 and 2001.72

Almost every Australian contributor came from an environmental management

department, rather than history.

The very

strong new ‘school’ of environmental history at Otago University contributed more than

half of the papers on New Zealand, many of them from early career researchers.

73 A significant number were based in a broad range of

interdisciplinary departments of the Australian National University. Both Australian and

New Zealand articles favoured forests over other environments. All but two of the

Australian papers dealt with the eastern states.74 Western Australia has recently redressed

the geographical imbalance (which goes well beyond Environment and History) with

Country an important collection of writings on Western Australian environmental history,

edited by Andrea Gaynor, Mathew Trinca and Anna Haebich.75 The desert is still a

neglected theme.76 Environment and History published no contributions from South

Australia or the Northern Territory, which are the two states that identify most strongly

with Australia’s desert environments. Only Joanna Sassoon’s paper on fish-eating birds

in Perth and Katie Pickles’ paper on urban wasteland near Christchurch dealt with

cities.77 Although the vast majority of papers was concerned in some way with the

history of science and/or natural resource management only one paper on the driest

inhabited continent dealt with river management.78

The apparent neglect of the history of engineering and technology by both

Australian and New Zealand environmental historians suggests a different trend from that

in the United States. There, Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr advanced the view that

environmental history and the history of technology were on strongly converging

pathways. ‘It can be difficult to write environmental history without paying at least

passing attention to technology’, they wrote of United States scholarship in December

2000.

79 They identified the areas of overlap in cities, public health and occupational

health and safety, industry and manufacturing and natural resources (especially water

engineering). Technology and environment as separate fields in Australia at least partly

because environment and natural resource management is constitutionally a primary

responsibility of the states, whilst technology and science tend to be ‘national’.80

19

The historical geographer J. M. Powell is the exception in this story. He has made

a significant and thorough study of water management and engineering over more than

three decades, taking the issue of water on the state-by-state basis, but by undertaking

work across a range of states, making it possible to comment on a national picture. In all

his work he has taken science, technology and institutions as part of his environmental

brief, integrating them into his analyses. But his focus on water projects has taken him to

what he calls Australia’s ‘restive fringe’ not its arid interior.81 The divide between ‘the

city and the bush’ is a major theme in Australian history, and it shapes environmental

historiography as well. Many important histories of cities include environmental

dimensions. Graeme Davison’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne

and his more recent Car Wars, on early Sydney Grace Karskens’ The Rocks and Inside

The Rocks and Alan Mayne’s Fever, Squalor and Vice, and in Perth, Tom Stannage’s

Lakeside City and Geoffrey Bolton and Jenny Gregory’s Claremont all figure as

‘history’, but somehow they are not considered ‘environmental history’.82 Yet Bolton’s

other work, particularly his Spoils and Spoilers, is regarded as a classic in Australian

environmental history.83

The ‘bush’ is environment, but the city is not. Institutions that govern rural and

wild country are generally politically and legally separate from the urban ones in

Australia, and while there is much science for the bush, the city’s wisdom comes from

engineering and from architecture and planning, not ecology. Wilderness does not have

the prominence in nationalistic thinking that it has in the United States, but there are a

handful of studies of the greening of Australian political consciousness particularly in

relation to national parks and bushwalking that have been influential.

84 Forests,

mountains and rambling are the activist issues for New Zealand too, not cities.85 Art

history is generally not environmental either, though Tim Bonyhady’s work, including

his major book The Colonial Earth, is an exception to this.86 The same ‘outside the city’

bias is evident in New Zealand’s environmental histories, although Eric Pawson and Tom

Brooking made a conscious effort to redress this with two urban chapters in their recent

collection.87 Some newer scholars in the field, such as Western Australian historian

Andrea Gaynor are turning the city - particularly the issues surrounding an organic

suburban garden - into a place for environmental history.88 The green politics of the city

20

is important in both Australia and New Zealand, who were the first countries in the world

with successful green party candidates in the early 1980s, but this is still finding its way

into historical discourse.89

Environmental and Indigenous inheritances

We have been focusing on aspects of the shared environmental history of these

two southern settler societies, but it is the differences in experience and historiography

that are now increasingly emerging and these differences are often underpinned by

emerging scientific stories. Environmentally, Australia and New Zealand provide a

dramatic contrast.90 The wide, brown land, flat and worn, is a strange cousin to the green

and black, high, steaming islands. Their shared Gondwanan history is ancient and

overlaid. An ancestral continent that included New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, New

Caledonia and the Lord Howe Rise broke away from the bigger Gondwanan continent in

Jurassic time (205-135 million years ago), even before the separation between what later

became India and Australia. Very different climates and geological histories have had

more than one hundred million years to foster evolutionary divergence. Australia is an

old, geologically quiescent land with poor soils, little relief and slow rivers, indeed none

at all over large areas. About seventy percent of it is ‘arid’. Arid and semi-arid lands have

average annual rainfalls of about 250 mm in the south but up to 800 mm in the north and

about 500 mm in the east. Evaporation and the unpredictability of rainfall are greater

limiting factors than lack of rain per se. Averages are just statistics in Australia. They do

not represent a reliable amount of rain on any sort of seasonal basis. An ‘average annual

fall’ is usually the result of one major annual fall amidst many years of ‘below average’

falls. The arid zone is defined by what it cannot do: it is the ‘rangelands, where rainfall is

too low or unpredictable or where terrain is too inhospitable for sustainable cropping or

timber harvesting.’91

By contrast New Zealand is a new land, straddling tectonic plates and covered

with sharp mountains, fiords, glaciers and rushing rivers. Although it has some

sedimentary rocks dating back 540 million years, most of its landscapes have emerged in

relatively recent times. No present landscape is older than about one million years,

because the land has been moving so rapidly (three to five centimetres per year).

92 It had

21

a more dynamic Pleistocene than Australia, and has fresh new soils, some still

emerging.93 Flat land is at a premium in the islands, and what exists has the benefit of

nutrients scoured from the sharp terrain around it. With the exception of bats, there were

no mammals on these islands, and most of the major ecological niches they occupied

elsewhere were in New Zealand taken up by birds. In this sense, writes scientist Tim

Flannery, ‘New Zealand is a completely different experiment in evolution to the rest of

the world …[showing] what the world might have looked like if mammals as well as

dinosaurs had become extinct 65 million years ago, leaving birds to inherit the globe’.94

The Indigenous peoples of Australia have long dwelled there: 55,000 years is the

current conservative estimate. They have very distinctive language and cultural relations

with the land, totally different from anywhere else in the world.

95 They had a largely

hunter-gatherer economy, nomadic within deeply known country, and their major tool of

landscape modification was fire. ‘Firestick farming’, as the archaeologist Rhys Jones

called it, encouraged an open grassland understorey with scattered trees, ideal for hunting

— and resembling, to European eyes, the gentleman’s park so prized in England.96

New Zealand’s Indigenous peoples may have been in those islands as little as

600—800 years, and have strong language and cultural links with other Pacific islanders.

Their settlements were shaped as much by wind as topography, with forts (pā) facing the

wind (whence others might arrive by sea) and hunting sites (evidenced by bones of the

now extinct Moa) in the leeward portions.

But

the marsupial fauna, and the overwhelming dominance of the fire-loving Eucalyptus

species (about 500 of them), made it a strange land to European eyes.

97

In both countries, settlers and their historians underestimated the extent to which

Māori and Aboriginal people had changed the environment before European arrival. That

revolution in understanding is still with us and constitutes one of the major themes of

environmental history in settler societies today. Green and black politics both emerged

strongly in the 1960s and helped provide much of the ‘moral purpose’ that Donald

Worster discerned in the new field of environmental history.

New Zealand’s first hunters ate birds and

fish. They also developed fern-root collection and agriculture, especially in the humid

north-west.

98 Disentangling the

independent (although often mutually supporting) historical strands of these two political

22

commitments has been one of the preoccupations of environmental history in Australasia

since the 1980s, and many of the people leading these debates have come from the

natural sciences.

Australians demanded an historical critique of ‘wilderness’ and its Eurocentric

character, and a belated recognition of Australia as an Aboriginal landscape, as well as

more sophisticated accounts of Indigenous land management.99 For example, just how

much environmental change was wrought by Aboriginal use of fire? Did the firestick

bring marked and widespread change to vegetation across the continent, or initiate a finer

rearrangement of existing mosaics? This is a vital and fascinating enquiry, but

intriguingly, some scholars still question whether Aboriginal burning had much impact at

all.100 The debate about the impact of Aboriginal landscape burning on the Australian

biota was ably reviewed in 1998 by the ecologist, David Bowman. Bowman rightly

regretted that ‘The knowledge and opinions of Aborigines have been rarely heard or

recorded in this debate’ and drew attention to the promising work now emerging in this

field.101 Australians are beginning to refine and develop Rhys Jones’s poetic insight of

firestick farming with a myriad of local ecological histories, and settlers are learning to

listen to and observe Aboriginal people who have been managing their country

continuously. Aboriginal peoples resist the distinction between nature and culture:

‘country is a place that gives and receives life’, as Deborah Rose puts it.102

In New Zealand, the effect of Māori hunting, fire and horticulture was

widespread. Their fire practices alone were ‘to virtually eliminate the forests of the

eastern South Island in a fairly brief pulse of burning, AD 1300—1450’.

Thus much

Aboriginal history is environmental history, and vice versa.

103 The

environmental transformation wrought by Māori and Pākehā over just hundreds of years

has been dramatic, and contradicts the nation’s current tourist image as harmoniously

‘clean and green’. It was this national historical amnesia about the timelessness of

‘beautiful landscapes’ that provoked one of the editors of the recent Environmental

Histories of New Zealand, historian Tom Brooking, to gather research about how bush

and scrub became farms, forests and gardens.104 In that book, Atholl Anderson offers a

masterly summary of the environmental effect of pre-European Māori since their

colonization of New Zealand in the twelfth or thirteeth century. Anderson describes the

23

widespread vertebrate extinctions and deforestation promptly caused by human

settlement, and the learning and adaptation that followed, and he also analyses the

century-long debates about the environmental impact of these first settlers as well as the

political uses of such arguments today. The scholarly consensus is now towards accepting

more recent dates for first settlement (600—800 years ago rather than 2000 years ago as

once thought) and a greater initial environmental impact than previously recognized.105

While New Zealand’s known human past — in chronological terms — has

shortened in recent decades, Australia’s has lengthened immeasurably in the same period.

The scientific discovery of human antiquity in Australia, always deeply known to

Aborigines themselves, awaited the twin revolutions of professional archaeology and

radiocarbon dating, both of which emerged in local practice in the 1950s and 60s. ‘No

segment of the history of Homo sapiens’, writes archaeologist John Mulvaney, ‘had been

so escalated since Darwin took time off the Mosaic standard.’

106 This dating revolution

not only linked Australia to a world Pleistocene past, it also began to sketch out an

intriguing human history and enabled a distinctive regional interpretation of hunter-

gatherer society. Different environmental pressures on the Australian continent led to a

very different — and, to Europeans, an unrecognizable — type of farming. Aboriginal

culture, it emerges, was innovative as well as ancient; no longer could it be simply

characterized as ‘the stone age’ of humanity. In Australia were found the world’s oldest

cremation, perhaps the earliest human art, by far the earliest watercraft in the world, the

first evidence of edge-ground axes, an early domesticated species in the dingo, millstones

that predated agricultural revolutions elsewhere, and the most ancient evidence of modern

humans. One glimpses a great, unfolding human drama in Ice Age Australia, as people

occupied new land left by the retreating coastal seas and themselves retreated from the

arid centre as cold droughts held sway. Thousands of years later, the sea regained land as

one seventh of greater Australia was inundated, and rains made the central deserts

accessible once more.107

As John MacKenzie has observed, the most recent phase of imperial natural

historical writing has tended to see the era of European imperialism as but a brief period

in the history of human interactions with tropical and sub-tropical ecologies.

108 Such

scholarship has revealed a much greater extent of environmental transformation by

24

Indigenous peoples than we had imagined, and it has discovered much longer cycles of

environmental ups and downs with which the colonial moment has sometimes

unknowingly interacted.

Epilogue: on future eating

We will conclude by reflecting on some debates surrounding a book on the

environmental history of Australasia that was published a decade ago, the year

Environment and History was founded. We have mentioned the book already: Tim

Flannery’s The Future Eaters, which was sub-titled ‘an ecological history of the

Australasian lands and people’. A focus on this book is useful as it encapsulates several

themes of this article. The Future Eaters explicitly revived Australasia as an essential

comparative context; it generated heated popular debates that distilled many of the recent

concerns of environmental history in this region; it made a narrative of recent discoveries

in biological science, archaeology and anthropology; and it cast a zoological eye on

humanity. Tim Flannery begins by noting how quickly knowledge changes: much of

what he learned at school in the 1980s about Australian history and nature has been

shown since to be misleading, partisan, or just plain wrong. He reveals this with both

wonder and caution. He knows that changing insights and sensibilities will eventually

leave his own book stranded; he shows, equally, how knowledge can be lost and

obscured. It is the sense that Flannery rides a fast-moving, eddying stream that makes his

book a great read as well as a fascinating and urgent intellectual journey.

Why has this book been controversial? The most obvious reason is that it applies

the ‘blitzkrieg hypothesis’ to Australia and argues that Aboriginal people hunted the

megafauna to extinction. This remains a scientifically unproven and contentious thesis,

and a politically sensitive one. The book’s environmental determinism has also attracted

admiration and criticism.109 Flannery explains better then anyone else why introduced

species overwhelmed Australian natives, and he does so by reversing one of our cultural

stereotypes, by depicting Europe as ‘The Backwater Country’. Europe is the new land,

more recently colonized by homo sapiens than Australia, with a simplified biota that had

to start again after the last ice age, and now populated by invasive, dominating weeds.

The Future Eaters confronted Australians with truths about their land that they have not

25

yet fully assimilated: that Australia has the poorest soils in the world, a stressful,

unreliable climate, a fragile and heavily interdependent ecology, and great biodiversity.

Published in the mid-1990s, it was the first popular history to use El Niño — which only

gained scientific respectability at the end of the 1980s — as an explanatory narrative

tool.110 The shortage of nutrients and dominance of droughts shaped Australian life.

Australians, he argues, need to learn to live by the country’s ecological dictums, they

need to find ‘an environmentally-based Australian identity’.111 Historians have been

unsettled by his ecological democracy, his disciplinary disobedience and by the ease with

which he sees us all as animals. ‘Mateship’ becomes an example of co-evolution, and

nomadism a nutrient-deficient life strategy. Flannery the scientist finds the commonality

of humans as a species and generalizes Aborigines and Europeans as both future-eaters,

both short-term, short-sighted exploiters of nature. Is the scientific habit of generalizing

across a species another form of western intellectual imperialism, one that dismisses

powerful cultural differences with a crude biological and environmental determinism?

Some critics have discerned a search for Anglo-Celtic legitimacy in a book that argues

that Aborigines exterminated the megafauna and then questions, on ecological grounds,

Australia’s policies on population, immigration and multiculturalism.112 The Bulletin

dubbed Flannery as a ‘scientist provocateur’ and it is certainly part of his art and

philosophy to use a palaeontologist’s gaze to unsettle contemporary political

complacencies.113 He does this also in his The Eternal Frontier, an ecological history of

North America and its peoples, where he shows that for 33 million years it was Eurasia

that was the world’s sole ecological superpower, and that the present American

dominance of global interests is out of step with its deep history.114

All of the debates generated by The Future Eaters are not just about the empirical

reality of Australian life across deep time; they also concern the style, discipline and

politics of environmental history, especially when it mischievously violates the

science/humanities divide. For example, the Australian archaeologist, Jim Allen, warns

against the power of narrative in speculative science. ‘We anthropologise the distant and

deep past more than we should; we make it up’, he reflects: ‘Some things are beyond our

reach.’ The attempt to write a smooth historical narrative, he continues, produces

‘counterfeit history’. Allen sees narrative as too compelling, too powerful, to function as

26

hypothesis. ‘Archaeological data is not historical data’, he concludes, ‘and archaeology is

not history’.115

Australasia itself is a creative and controversial category in The Future Eaters.

New Guinea was the cradle of Flannery’s science of society, as it was for the American

physiologist and zoologist, Jared Diamond, whose Guns, Germs and Steel is an

environmental history ‘of everybody’ over 13,000 years.

116 Both benefited from

formative fieldwork in New Guinea, where their zoology first became also anthropology.

And the New Zealand experiment presents itself as a very influential model for

Flannery’s reading of Australian history. The Māori hunted the moa to extinction in a few

hundred years, he explains, and so their fellow-humans across the Tasman, the

Aboriginal people, most likely did the same to the Australian megafauna. With his

ecologist’s eye on the decline and fall of species, Flannery applies a Pacific island

hypothesis to ancient Australia.117

Whether or not he is right, culture is here allowed little

play. As in Diamond’s magisterial analysis, Flannery’s humans are in the grip of an

environmental determinism, all children of the last ice age. The cultural and historical

nuances are elided in the Australasian parallel: that Aboriginal people were hunters and

gatherers and not agricultural in the manner of the Māori, that their encounter with the

megafauna took place tens of thousands of years earlier, that they lived in a mammalian

world rather than a bird-dominated ecology, that they inhabited a continent, not so much

an island, that they developed different spiritualities: these exciting differences can be

overwhelmed in the swarm of a single species. However useful a tool ecology may seem,

historians ultimately have to resist its imperialism.

We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Associate

Professor Tom Brooking and Dr Paul Star, University of Otago, New Zealand.

1 McLean, 2003. 2 Smith 2003. 3 Blainey 1966: 72. 4 Denoon 2003; Belich 2001. 5 Russell McGregor, ‘Looking across the Tasman: New Zealand Exemplars in Australian Indigenous Affairs’, Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the NZ Historical Association, Dunedin, November 2003. For a recent comparative study of Indigenous history and memory in Australia and New Zealand, see Attwood and Magowan 2001. 6 Seddon 2002. 7 For a summary of ‘New Zealand-Australian Relations’, see Olssen 1998.

27

8 Curthoys 2002: 142. 9 Denoon and Mein-Smith 2000. 10 Curthoys 2002: 140. 11 Powell 1977, 1988; Pyne 1991, 1997; Dunlap 1999; Grove 1997; Tyrrell 1999. Donald Meinig in 1961 was an early example of a scholar bringing a North American sensibility to the lands of South Australia, in his Margins of the Good Earth. Part of the novelty of his work was the fact that South Australia was (and perhaps still is) the state most overtly proud of its British heritage. 12 Flannery 1994. New Guinea historiography is not (yet) represented in Environment and History. For some environmental history of the region with a military flavour, see Gammage 1998. 13 http://www.publish.csiro.au/journals/emu/. This definition comes from 2001, when they introduced the subtitle Austral Ornithology to the journal. Wallace’s Line was drawn between Bali and Lombok by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859 on the basis of the distinctive birds on either side. See Robin 2001, 18—19. For a study of the ‘Asia’ in ‘Australasia’, see Walker 1999. 14 Cited by Brooking and Pawson 2003: 375. 15 Clark 1949. Crosby 1986. 16 Pawson and Brooking 2002. ‘Introduction’: 1. See also King 2003. 17 Morton 1994. The accident reference was made in his address to a workshop on ‘Environmental History in the National Museum of Australia’, jointly sponsored by the Museum and the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, 14 April, 1999. 18 See Geoff Park’s wonderful and sobering history of these forests: Park 1995, also Park 2002. 19 Other pesticides dominate the apple industry in New Zealand, as Roche 2003 notes. 20 Hancock 1972: 72. 21 Wynn 2002: 100. 22 For a detailed assessment of Tutira, see Wynn 1997. 23 Guthrie-Smith 1999: 278, xvii. 24 Eric Rolls, Letters to Sue Ebury and Tim Curnow, 1976-80, Rolls Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 7027, Box 1, Folder 2. 25 Rolls 1981: 399. 26 Rolls 1997, 2000. 27 The Vermin and Noxious Weeds Destruction Board operated in Victoria in the 1960s and 1970s, and most states have a Weed Society dating from this time. The first national conference on Australian Weeds was 1976, and they are still active groups. (See http://home.vicnet.net.au/~weedsoc/history.html, accessed 3 August 2004). Not all ‘pests’, of course, are aliens: see Frost 1998 on native animals in the South Gippsland forests. Some pests crossed the Tasman. The Brushtail Possum is an ‘invasive menace’ in New Zealand. See Clout and Sarre 1997. Acclimatized weeds and pests, especially rabbits have dominated the scientific and management discourses: see Rolls 1969, Coman 1999, Clayton 2003. 28 Lowenthal 1997: 235. 29 Isern 2002: 244. 30 Isern 2002: 245, 240. For further explorations of the meaning of ‘wild’ in postcolonial Australia and New Zealand, see the chapters by Nigel Clark, John Morton and Nicholas Smith, and Geoff Park in Neumann, Thomas and Ericksen 1999. Two important books that analyse the environmental, psychological and biological dimensions of the White Australia policy are Walker 1999 and Warwick Anderson 2002. 31 Roche 1997: 450. 32 Cumberland [1977] 1980. 33 Grey 1994. 34 Guthrie-Smith [1921] 1999: 125—6. 35 Guthrie-Smith [1940] 1999: xxiii. 36 Guthrie-Smith 1936: 16. 37 MacKenzie 1997: 218—20. 38 Guthrie-Smith 1936: 16. 39 Guthrie-Smith [1921] 1999: 309. 40 The Swede, Carl von Linné introduced classification using binomial nomenclature in 1749. 41 Home forthcoming. Strahan 1979.

28

42 Seddon 1997, 73—82. He also made this argument in a scientific context in 1974. See G. Seddon 1974. ‘Xerophytes, Xeromorphs and Sclerophylls: The History of Some Concepts in Ecology’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 6(1): 65—87. 43 Despite this historically rich start, later goldfields histories have been rather more focused on social than environmental conditions. Mining history is surprisingly absent from the environmental literature in Australasia, something Pawson and Brooking (2002) tried to rectify with a chapter from Terry Hearn ‘Mining the Quarry’ (84—99). But mining history in Australia - where there is a much greater part of the economy dependent on income from this industry is relegated to a separate category, like cities. One early example of a fine mining history with environmental insight is Geoffrey Blainey’s 1954 history of copper mining in Tasmania, The Peaks of Lyell (Carlton: Melbourne University Press), which has been republished several times since. There has also been some discussion of uranium extraction in an historical context in Jim Falk’s 1982 Global Fission (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). 44 Studies of colonial botanical gardens and government botanists have been generally the province of historians of science rather than environment. One major international project on Ferdinand von Mueller, Victoria’s first Government Botanist, headed by Rod Home (Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne), has been running since the 1980s. It has already yielded two massive edited volumes of letters, entitled Regardfully Yours (Bern: Peter Lang), with more imminent, and a biography expected to follow. 45 Home, typescript, kindly provided by the author: 7. 46 MacLeod 1988. (see especially Linden Gillbank's chapter). The Australasian emphasis continues to the present in the history of science: the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science meets on both sides of the Tasman, and the journal Historical Records of Australian Science publishes and reviews works on the history of science in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania. 47 Cockayne was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Munich in 1903, and was commissioned in 1904 by the famous international plant-geographer, Professor Dr A. Engler to contribute the New Zealand fascicle to his comprehensive Vegetation der Erde. Although this was much delayed by Cockayne’s ill-health and the intervention of the war, it eventually appeared as The Vegetation of New Zealand in 1921. Revised editions appeared in 1928 and subsequently, and it remained the standard work for some seven decades. (.Cockayne 1958. Preface to the first edition (1921) and the second edition (1928), v—vii.) See also Thomson 1996. Thomson 1983. 48 Cockayne was Fellow of the Linnean Society (1910) and of the Royal Society (1912). He received the Darwin Medal in 1928. Unlike the more famous New Zealand born Rutherford, the English-born Cockayne never left New Zealand after arriving in 1881 (from England via Australia.). His biographer, Thomson, called him ‘the founder of modern science in New Zealand’. 49 Cockayne 1908. ‘Introduction’: 2 50 The Otari Open Air Native Plant Museum, at Wilton Wellington, established in 1927, was a public botanical garden for the display of New Zealand plants. The decision to devote the Australian National Botanical Garden to showcasing Australian plants was not made until 1960, although Canberra’s gardens began (just six years after the city itself) in 1933. See Robin 2003. 51 Figures adapted from Rolls 1984: 440—2. Brigalow is the open forest of drier south-eastern Queensland, dominated by Acacia harpophylla. On the Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board, see Schedvin 1987: 90—6. 52 See Robin 1997. 53 Currie and Graham 1966: v. Galbreath 1998 cited Australia as a leading example in the arguments for DSIR, but Australia, which had had various struggling government institutions for science since 1916 would never have moved into the better funded CSIR model without outside incentives. 54 Holland, O’Connor and Wearing 2002. 55 Brooking, Hodge and Wood 2002: 171. 56 Ratcliffe 1953: 322. The subtitle was ‘The Adventures of a Biologist in Australia’. 57 The Soil Conservation Service of New South Wales (1938) and the Soil Conservation Authority in Victoria (1940) followed Ratcliffe's report to CSIR — although the concern about water quality in hydro-electric schemes was a key motivator for these as well. (No soil conservation service was established in South Australia, the state at the heart of his inquiry.) The commonwealth funded CSIRO Alpine Ecology Unit was also involved in soil and vegetation mapping in the 1950s. See Robin 1998.

29

58 Vegetation mapping in key watershed areas such as the Australian alps was among projects funded by state soil conservation authorities. See Robin 1998; Main 1999. For more on Ratcliffe, see Dunlap 1997. 59 John Gibb, a DSIR rabbit researcher, cited in Dunlap 1997: 81. 60 Cockayne 1958: 426 61 More complex science also blurred the debates, and this did not always come from within Australasia. Cockayne found himself uncomfortably on the other side in the debate about deer described by Dunlap 1997, where US game manager Thane Riney recommended population management, rather than eradication of individual deer in an effort to save the forests that Cockayne prized. See also Galbreath 1993. 62 For example, Barr and Cary 1992 (written by an agricultural scientist and a landscape ecologist). People trained in natural sciences also lead in the historiography of science in both Australia and New Zealand, but this is the case elsewhere in the world too. 63 Redclift 1995: 121. 64 Dovers 1994; Dovers 2000a, Dovers 2000b. 65 Dovers 2000b: 131. 66 See for example, Wasson and Sidorchuk 2000. 67 For analyses of trends see Dargavel 2002b; McManus 1999. Major forest histories include Griffiths 2001 and Dargavel 1995. An important collection dealing with the previously neglected genus Callitris (native pine) is Dargavel, Hart and Libbis 2001. 68 A further five historical articles were contributed by historians from United States, Scottish and New Zealand universities, and eleven of the consultants noted above identified themselves as public historians or experts in cultural heritage. The majority of government agencies were National Parks and Wildlife Services and Forestry Services. Some of these contributors had qualifications in history, geography or archaeology, but the majority were foresters or biologists. The Proceedings were Frawley and Semple 1989; Dargavel and Feary 1993; Dargavel 1997, Dargavel and Libbis 1999, and Dargavel, Gaughwin and Libbis 2002a. Another conference is scheduled for September 2004 in Augusta, Western Australia. 69 Bill Gammage (University of Adelaide) in Dovers 1994 and Ross Johnston (University of Queensland) in Dovers 2000a. 70 In Volume 3, the only Australian contribution was an extended book review by J.M. Powell (Geography and Environmental Studies, Monash University). 71 Volume 9(4), 2003, with eight papers on New Zealand subjects. 72 Bennett 2000a, a taster for Bennett 2000b; See also Bennett 2001. Note that there was also one other paper on ‘deep’ environmental history in Oceania by Fijian geographers, Nunn and Britton 2001. This is all so far for the Oceanic region (beyond Australia and New Zealand) in Environment and History. 73 The exceptions were A.R. Main, an honorary fellow in the Zoology department at the University of Western Australia, and Peter Herbst, an environmental activist for Friends of Mongarlowe. 74 The two Western Australian contributions were Main 1996 about fire and vegetation (from a zoologist) and Sassoon 2003 on fish-eating birds and fisheries policies (from a cultural heritage specialist). In addition to the papers about particular places, there were survey articles (Dovers 2000b; Pawson and Dovers 2003), two editorial ‘survey’ papers accompanying the special issues (Dargavel 1998; Brooking and Pawson 2003) and comparative papers: (McManus 1999, Read and Wyndham 2001 and Pawson and Dovers 2003). The comparisons were between Australia and Canada — forests; Australia and Cuba — masculinity/landscapes; and Australia and New Zealand — environmental history writing. 75 Gaynor, Trinca and Haebich 2002. 76 Deserts are the theme of ongoing work at the National Museum of Australia (including a major exhibition in 2005) comparing Australian deserts and desert peoples with those in Namibia, Chile and Argentina. 77 Sassoon 2003; Pickles 2003. 78 Webster and Mullins 2003. 79 Stine and Tarr 2000. 80 This does not apply to New Zealand, of course. 81 His term ‘restive fringe’ also refers to Australia’s predicament in global affairs. J. M. Powell has been a leader in many aspects of the historical geography of Australia, and its intersection with environmental history. See Powell 1995. Since 1976 Powell has concerned himself particularly with the science and

30

institutions of natural resource management: Powell 1970; 1973; 1976; 1977; 1988. His water oeuvre includes: Powell.1989; 1991; 1993; 1998. He has also considered Australasian comparisons: Powell 1997. 82 Davison 1979, 2004; Karskens 1997, 1999; Mayne 1982; Stannage 1996; Bolton and Gregory 1999. There are many more, but these exemplify good histories of three cities in very different periods, from early nineteenth-century starts through to post-war suburban developments. Science and technology studies is another active area in Australia that seeks to combine technology and environment, especially in recent history. Sharon Beder’s Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing (1989) covers some recent history in a modern urban context. Geographers and urban planners such as Dan Coward (1988) have also studied urban water issues historically and to the present era.82 For a collection of essays about urban history in both Australia and New Zealand, see ‘Cities Down Under’, a special issue edited by Graeme Davison of the Journal of Urban History, 22(1), November 1995. 83 Bolton 1981; 1992. 84 Bonyhady 1993; Robin 1998; Hutton and Connors 1999; Crawford and Crawford 2003. 85 Star 2002; Star and Lochhead 2002; Pawson 2002b; Park 1995; Park 2002. 86 Bonyhady 2000. Interestingly much of Bonyhady’s research was initially conceived while he was part of the Urban Research Program at the Australian National University, including his paper in the first volume of Environment and History. (Bonyhady 1995). The Urban Research Program, established in 1966, was one of very few institutions in Australia that considered urban issues on a national and historical basis. It was controversially disbanded in 1999, and its former Director, Patrick Troy is now based at the ANU’s Centre for Environmental Studies. 87 Pawson 2002a on making urban places and Leach 2002 on suburban gardens. 88 Gaynor 1999. 89 On the rise of green politics in Tasmania and elsewhere, Pybus and Flanagan 1990; Papadakis 1993. On New Zealand, see Dann 2002. 90 Tom Brooking has reflected that one of the reasons for producing his and Eric Pawson’s Environmental Histories of New Zealand (2002) was ‘a determination to make clear to the rest of the world that there is no point in tacking New Zealand on to Australia in global studies because, in this regard as in so many others, our stories are spectacularly different’ : Brooking, ‘Together Apart’, Foreign Policy School Lecture, 2001. 91‘What are the Arid Lands of Australia?’ in website for CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems: Centre for Arid Zone Research — Alice Springs, http://www.cazr.csiro.au/aridzone_introduction.htm. 92Its most recent phase of mountain building began 25 million years ago, but the ongoing changes have been so fast that new landscapes are evolving constantly. See http: www.otago.ac.nz/Geology. 93 Seddon 1997: 224. 94 Flannery 1994: 55. 95 Many Aboriginal languages are said to be ‘ergonomic’ — that is there is no distinction between the noun and the verb — the actor and the action are together as one. 96 Jones 1969. 97 The number of years Māori have been in New Zealand has been recently revised downwards, from about 2,000 years to 600-800. See Anderson 2002. 98 Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, p. 290. 99 Head 2000; Griffiths 1996; Griffiths 2003. 100 See Horton 2000. 101 Bowman, 1998a: 386. He cites Lewis 1989; Latz 1995; Rose 1995, 1996; Russell-Smith et al 1997, and Langton 1998. Since Bowman’s review article, Bill Gammage has begun a study of Aboriginal land management practices. See Gammage 2003 and his earlier Narrandera Shire (Gammage 1986), a local history with unusual environmental sensitivity. 102 Rose 1996: 7. See also Rose 1995, Rose 2000. 103 Anderson 2002: 31. 104 Pawson and Booking 2002: xi-xii. 105 Anderson 2002. 106 Mulvaney 1986, Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999. 107 Smith 1993, 2004. 108 MacKenzie 1997.

31

109 See for example Seddon 1995, Head 1995, Bowman 1998b. See also Paul Sheehan, ‘The Crucifixion of St Timothy’, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, 5-6 June 2004, 4-5. 110 On the history of El Niño as a concept, see Nicholls 2004. 111 This was the argument of Flannery’s Australia Day address, Sydney, 2002. An edited version was published as ‘Chance to shape the people of the future’, Australian, 24 January 2002. 112 For example, Jenny Lee in Australian Book Review, 168, Feb/Mar 1995, 15—16. 113 The Bulletin, 10 September 1996, 26—7. 114 Flannery 2001. 115 Jim Allen, Archaeology Seminar, Australian National University, 26 March 1999; also ‘Hunter Gatherers as Colonisers: The First Humans East of the Wallace Line’, The Mulvaney Lecture, Australian National University, 24 March 1999. 116 Diamond 1998. 117 Spriggs 2001, Vicki Lukere, ‘Pacific History by Evolutionary Biologists’, Paper presented to the Pacific History Association Conference, Canberra, 27 June 2000. Flannery’s thesis is also contested in New Zealand: Jim Williams, ‘E pākihi hakinga a kai’, Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Historical Association, Dunedin, November 2003. REFERENCES Anderson, Atholl 2002. ‘A Fragile Plenty: Pre-European Māori and the New Zealand Environment’ in

Pawson and Brooking (ed), Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 19—34. Anderson, Warwick 2002. The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia,

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Attwood, Bain and Fiona Magowan 2001. Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia

and New Zealand, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Barr, Neil and John Cary 1992. Greening a Brown Land: The Australian Search for Sustainable Land Use,

South Melbourne: Macmillan Education. Beder, Sharon 1989. Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing: How Deceit and Collusion are Destroying our Great

Beaches. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Belich, James 2001. Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000,

Auckland: Penguin. Bennett, Judith A. 2000a. ‘"The grievous mistakes of the Vanikoro concession": The Vanikoro Kauri

Timber Company, Solomon Islands, 1926—1964’, Environment and History 6(3), 317—47. Bennett, Judith A. 2000b, Pacific Forest: A History of Resource Control and Contest in Solomon Islands, c

1800—1997, Cambridge: White Horse Press. Bennett, Judith A. 2001. ‘War, Emergency and the Environment: Fiji, 1939—1946’. Environment and

History 7(3), 255—87. Blainey, Geoffrey 1966. The Tyranny of Distance. Adelaide: Sun Books. Bolton, Geoffrey 1981. Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment 1788—1980. Sydney:

George Allen & Unwin. [revised 1992, with a new subtitle A History of Australians Shaping their Environment]

Bolton, Geoffrey and Jenny Gregory 1999. Claremont: A History. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press.

Bonyhady, Tim 1993. Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics, and Law Bonyhady, Tim 1995. ‘Artists with Axes’, Environment and History 1(1995): 221—39 Bonyhady, Tim 2000. The Colonial Earth. Carlton: Miegunyah Press. Bonyhady, Tim and Tom Griffiths (ed) 2002. Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia,

Sydney: UNSW Press. Bowman, D. M .J. S. 1998a. ‘Tansley Review No. 101: The Impact of Aboriginal Landscape Burning on

the Australian Biota’, New Phytologist 140, 385—410. Bowman, D. M. J. S. 1998b. ‘Marsupial megafauna, Aborigines and the overkill hypothesis: application of

predator-prey models to the question of Pleistocene extinction in Australia’, Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 7, 167-180.

32

Brooking, Tom and Eric Pawson 2003. ‘Editorial: New Zealand Environmental Histories’, Environment

and History, 9 (4): 375—8. Brooking, Tom, Robin Hodge and Vaughan Wood 2002. ‘The Grasslands Revolution Reconsidered’ in

Pawson and Brooking (ed) Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 169—82. Clark, Andrew Hill 1949. The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals, Piscataway:

Rutgers University Press. Clayton, Neil 2003. ‘Weeds, People and Contested Places’, Environment and History, 9 (3): 301—31. Clout, M.N. and S.D. Sarre 1997. ‘Model Marsupial or Menace — a Review of Research on Brushtail

Possums in Australia and New Zealand’, Wildlife Society Bulletin 25: 168—72 Cockayne, Leonard 1908. Report on a Botanical Survey of the Tongariro National Park, Wellington:

Department of Lands. Cockayne, Leonard 1958. The Vegetation of New Zealand 3rd ed. (earlier editions 1921, 1928) London and

New York, H. R. Engelmann (J. Cramer). Coman, Brian 1999. Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia, Melbourne: Text Publishing. Coward, Dan 1988. Out of Sight: Sydney’s Environmental History 1851—1981. Canberra: Research School

of Social Sciences, ANU. Crawford, Patricia and Ian Crawford 2003. Contested Country: A History of the Northcliffe Area, Western

Australia, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Crosby, Alfred 1986. Ecological Imperialism, New York: Cambridge University Press. Cumberland, Kenneth B. [1977] 1980.’A Future for Agriculture’ in A. Grant Anderson (ed.) The Land Our

Future: Essays on Land Use and Conservation in New Zealand in Honour of Kenneth Cumberland, Auckland: NZ Geographical Society/Longman Paul Ltd: 291—307.

Currie, George and John Graham 1966. The Origins of CSIRO: Science and the Commonwealth Government 1901—1926, Melbourne, CSIRO.

Curthoys, Ann 2002. ‘Does Australian History Have a Future?’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. 118, 2002.

Dann, Christine 2002. ‘Losing Ground? Environmental Problems and Prospects at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century’, in Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 275—87.

Dargavel, John 1998. ‘Editorial’ Environment and History, 4(2). 127—8 Dargavel, John 2002b ‘Sources and Silences in Australian Forest History’ in Dargavel, Gaughwin and

Libbis (ed), Australia’s Ever-changing Forests V, 39—48. Dargavel. John (ed) 1997. Australia’s Ever-changing Forests III, Canberra CRES/AFHS. Dargavel. John and Brenda Libbis (ed) 1999. Australia’s Ever-changing Forests IV, Canberra

CRES/AFHS. Dargavel. John, and Sue Feary (ed) 1993. Australia’s Ever-changing Forests II, Canberra CRES/AFHS. Dargavel, John 1995. Fashioning Australia’s Forests, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Dargavel, John, Diane Hart and Brenda Libbis (ed) Perfumed Pineries: Environmental History of

Australia’s Callitris Forests, Canberra: CRES/AFHS. Dargavel. John, Denise Gaughwin and Brenda Libbis (ed) 2002a Australia’s Ever-changing Forests V,

Canberra CRES/AFHS. Davison, Graeme (with Sheryl Yelland) 2004 Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our

Cities, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004. Davison, Graeme 1978. The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Denoon, Donald and Phillipa Mein-Smith 2000. Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific: The Formation of

Identities, Oxford: Blackwells. Denoon, Donald 2003 ‘Re-Membering Australasia: A Repressed Memory’, Australian Historical Studies,

vol. 34, no. 122: 290—304. Diamond, Jared 1998. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody For the Last 13,000 Years,

London: Vintage. Dingle, Tony and Carolyn Rasmussen 1991. Vital Connections: Melbourne and its Board of Works 1891—

1991. Melbourne: Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. Dovers, Stephen (ed) 1994. Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases, Melbourne: Oxford

University Press.

33

Dovers, Stephen (ed.) 2000a. Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia, Melbourne,

Oxford University Press. Dovers, Stephen R. 2000b. ‘On the Contribution of Environmental History to Current Debate and Policy’,

in Environment and History 6: 131—50. Dunlap, Thomas R. 1997. ‘Ecology and Environmentalism in the Anglo Settler Colonies’, in Griffiths and

Robin 1997, Ecology and Empire: 76—86. Dunlap, Thomas R. 1999. Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States,

Canada, Australia and New Zealand, New York: Cambridge University Press. Flannery, Tim 1994. The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People,

Sydney: Reed Books. Flannery, Tim 2001. The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples,

Melbourne: Text Publishing. Frawley, K. J. and N. Semple (ed) 1989. Australia’s Ever-changing Forests, Canberra: Geography

ADFA/AFHS. Frost, Warwick 1998 ‘Pests and Agriculture 1800—1920’, Environment and History, 4 (2): 129—43. Galbreath, Ross 1993, Working for Wildlife: A History of the New Zealand Wildlife Service, Wellington:

Bridget Williams Books and Department of Internal Affairs. Galbreath, Ross 1998. DSIR: Making Science Work for New Zealand, Wellington: Victoria University

Press. Gammage, Bill 1986. Narrandera Shire Narrandera: Bill Gammage for the Narrandera Shire Council. Gammage, Bill 1998. The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938—1939, Carlton: Melbourne

University Press. Gammage, Bill 2003. Australia Under Aboriginal Management, 15th Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture,

2002, Canberra: University College, University of NSW, Australian Defence Force Academy. Gaynor, Andrea 1999. ‘Regulation, Resistance and the Residential Area: the Keeping of Productive

Animals in Twentieth-Century Perth, Western Australia’, Urban Policy and Research, 17(1): 7—16. Grey, Alan 1994. Aotearoa and New Zealand: A Historical Geography, Christchurch, Canterbury

University Press. Griffiths, Tom 1996. Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. Griffiths, Tom 2001. Forests of Ash: An Environmental History. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University

Press. Griffiths, Tom 2002. ‘How many trees make a forest? Cultural debates about vegetation change in

Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany, 50(4), 2002: 375—89. Griffiths, Tom and Libby Robin (ed) 1997. Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler

Societies, Edinburgh: Keele University Press. Grove, Richard H. 1997. Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History,

1400-1940, Cambridge: The White Horse Press. Guthrie-Smith, Herbert 1936. Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist, Reed, Dunedin and

Wellington. Guthrie-Smith, Herbert 1999. Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station.[1st ed. Edinburgh:

Blackwood, 1921] Seattle: University of Washington Press. Hancock, W. K. 1972. Discovering Monaro: a Study of Man’s Impact on his Environment, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. Head, Lesley 1995. ‘Meganesian Barbecue: Reply to Seddon’, Meanjin, 54: 702—9. Head, Lesley 2000. Second Nature: The History and Implications of Australia as Aboriginal Landscape

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Holland, Peter, Kevin O’Connor and Alexander Wearing 2002. ‘Remaking the Grasslands of the Open

Country’ in Pawson and Brooking (ed) Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 69—83. Home, R. W. forthcoming. ‘Science in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’, in Livingstone and Numbers

(ed) Modern Science in National and International Context, Volume 8 in the Cambridge History of Science series.

Horton, David 2000, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment, St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin.

34

Hutton, Drew and Libby Connors 1999. A History of the Australian Environment Movement, Melbourne:

Cambridge University Press. Isern, Thomas D. 2002. ‘Companions, Stowaways, Imperialists, Invaders: Pests and Weeds in New

Zealand’, in Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 233—45. Jones, Rhys 1969. ‘Fire-Stick Farming’; Australian Natural History, Volume 16: 224—8 Karskens, Grace 1997. The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney, Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Karskens, Grace 1999. Inside The Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood, Sydney: Hale &

Iremonger. King, Michael 2003. The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland: Penguin Books. Langton, Marcia 1998. Burning Questions: Emerging Environmental Issues for Indigenous Peoples in

Northern Australia. Darwin: Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University.

Latz, Peter 1995. Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia. Alice Springs: IAD Press.

Leach, Helen 2002. ‘Exotic Natives and Contrived Wild Gardens: The Twentieth-century Home Garden’, in Pawson and Brooking (ed) Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 214—32.

Lewis, H.T. 1989. ‘Ecological and Technological Knowledge of Fire: Aborigines Versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia’, American Anthropology, 91: 940—61.

Lowenthal, David 1997. ‘Empires and Ecologies: Reflections on Environmental History’, in Griffiths and Robin (ed) Ecology and Empire: 229—36.

MacKenzie, John 1997. ‘Empire and the Ecological Apocolypse: the Historiography of the Imperial Environment’, in Griffiths and Robin (ed) Ecology and Empire: 215—28.

MacLeod, Roy (ed.) 1988. The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in

Australasia, 1888-1988, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Main, A. R. 1996. ‘Ghosts of the Past: Where does Environmental History Begin?’, Environment and History, 2(1): 97—114.

Main, George 1999. Of Beauty Rich and Rare: Fifty Years of CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, Canberra: CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology.

Mayne, Alan 1982. Fever, Squalor and Vice: Sanitation and Social Policy in Victorian Sydney, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

McLean, Denis 2003. The Prickly Pair: Making Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand, Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

McManus, Phil 1999. ‘Histories of Forestry: Ideas, Networks and Silences’, Environment and History 5(2), 185—208.

Meinig, D.W. 1961. On the Margins of the Good Earth: the South Australian Wheat Frontier 1869—1884, Chicago: Rand McNally for the Association of American Geographers.

Morton, Stephen 1994. ‘European Settlement and the Mammals of Arid Australia’, in Dovers (ed) Australian Environmental History: 141—66.

Mulvaney, D. J. 1986. ‘Archaeological Retrospect 9’, Antiquity, 60: 96-107. Mulvaney, D. J. and Kamminga, J. 1999. Prehistory of Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Neumann, Klaus, Nicholas Thomas and Hilary Ericksen (eds) 1999. Quicksands: Foundational histories in

Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Sydney: UNSW Press. Nicholls, Neville 2004. ‘Climatic Outlooks: From Revolutionary Science to Orthodoxy’ in Sherratt,

Griffiths and Robin (eds), A Change in the Weather: chapter 2. Nunn, Patrick D. and James M. R. Britton 2001. ‘Human-Environment Relationships in the Pacific Islands

around AD 1300’, Environment and History 7(1), 3—22. Olssen, Erik 1998. ‘New Zealand-Australian Relations’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart

Macintyre (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne: Oxford, 466—67. Papadakis, Elim 1993. Politics and the Environment: The Australian Experience, St. Leonards: Allen &

Unwin. Park, Geoff 1995. Ngā Uruora, The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape,

Wellington: Victoria University Press.

35

Park, Geoff 2002. ‘"Swamps Which Might Doubtless Easily be Drained": Swamp Drainage and its Impact

on the Indigenous’, in Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 151—68. Pawson, Eric 2002a. ‘On the Edge: Making Urban Places’, in Pawson and Brooking (ed) Environmental

Histories of New Zealand: 200—13. Pawson, Eric 2002b. ‘The Meaning of Mountains’ in Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of

New Zealand: 136—50. Pawson, Eric and Stephen Dovers 2003. ‘Environmental History and the Challenges of Interdisciplinarity:

An Antipodean Perspective’, Environment and History, 9(1): 53—75. Pawson, Eric and Tom Brooking 2002. Environmental Histories of New Zealand, South Melbourne:

Oxford. Pickles, Katie 2003. ‘The Re-Creation of Bottle Lake: From Site of Discard to Environmental Playground’,

Environment and History, 9(4): 419—34. Powell, J. M. (ed) 1973 Yeomen and Bureaucrats: the Victorian Crown Lands Commission, 1878—79.

Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Powell, J. M. 1970. The Public Lands of Australia Felix: Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834—

91 with Special Reference to the Western Plains, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Powell, J. M. 1976. Environmental Management in Australia, 1788—1914, Guardians, Improvers and

Profit: An Introductory Survey. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Powell, J. M. 1977. Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-makers in the Settlement Process

Folkestone: Archon Books. Powell, J. M. 1988. An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, (reprinted 1991). Powell, J. M. 1989. Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria, 1834—1988,

Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Powell, J. M. 1991. Plains of Promise, Rivers of Destiny: Water Management and the Development of

Queensland 1824—1990. Brisbane: Boolarong. Powell, J. M. 1993. The Emergence of Bioregionalism in the Murray-Darling Basin, Canberra: Murray-

Darling Basin Commission. Powell, J. M. 1995. Historical Geography and Environmental History: an Australian Interface, Clayton:

Monash University Dept. of Geography and Environmental Science. (Working paper no. 40). Powell, J. M. 1997. ‘Past Imperfect, Future Tense: “Civic” Conjugations in Australia and New Zealand’,

Journal of Historical Geography, 23(4): 389-392. Powell, J. M. 1998. Watering the Western Third: Water, Land and Community in Western Australia,

1826—1998. Perth: Water and Rivers Commission. Pybus, Cassandra and Richard Flanagan (ed) 1990. The Rest of the World is Watching, Sydney: Sun. Pyne, Stephen J. 1991. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, New York: Henry Holy and Company. Pyne, Stephen J. 1997. Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told Through Fire, of Europe and Europe’s

Encounter with the World, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Ratcliffe, Francis 1953. Flying Fox and Drifting Sand: The Adventures of a Biologist in Australia. (first

published 1938), Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Read, Peter and Marivic Wyndham 2001. ‘The Farmer and the Bushman’, Environment and History 7(1):

109—24. Redclift, Michael 1995. ‘The Environment and Society as Global Discourse’, Environment and History

1(1): 111—23. Robin, Libby 1997. ‘Ecology: A Science of Empire?’ in Griffiths and Robin (ed) Ecology and Empire:

63—75. Robin, Libby 1998. ‘Radical Ecology and Conservation Science: An Australian perspective’ Environment

and History, 4(2): 191—208. Robin, Libby 1998. Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia,

Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Robin, Libby 2001. The Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901—2001,

Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Robin, Libby 2003. ‘Collections and the Nation: Science, History and the National Museum of Australia’,

Historical Records of Australian Science 14(3): 251—89.

36

Roche, Michael 1997. ‘”The Land We Have We Must Hold”: Soil Erosion and Soil Conservation in Late

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century New Zealand’, Journal of Historical Geography, 23(4): 447—58.

Roche, Michael 2003 ‘Wilderness to Orchard’, Environment and History, 9 (4): 435—50. Rolls, Eric 1981. A Million Wild Acres, Melbourne: Nelson. Rolls, Eric 1984. They All Ran Wild: the Story of Pests on the Land in Australia, [first ed. 1969] Sydney:

Angus and Robertson. Rolls, Eric 1997. ‘The Nature of Australia’, in Griffiths and Robin (ed) Ecology and Empire: 35-45. Rolls, Eric 2000. Australia: A Biography. Volume 1: The Beginnings, St Lucia: University of Queensland

Press. Rose, Deborah Bird 1995 (ed.) Country in Flames: Proceedings of the 1994 Symposium on Biodiversity

and Fire in North Australia Canberra: Biodiversity Unit, Dept. of the Environment, Sport and Territories.

Rose, Deborah Bird 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.

Rose, Deborah Bird 2000 (first edition 1992) Dingo Makes us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press.

Russell-Smith, Jeremy et al. 1997. ‘Aboriginal Resource Utilization and Fire Management Practice in Western Arnhem Land, Monsoonal Northern Australia: Notes for Prehistory, Lessons for the Future’ Human Ecology, 25(2), 159—95.

Sassoon, Joanna 2003. ‘ “The Common Cormorant or Shag lays Eggs inside a Paper Bag”. A Cultural Ecology of Fish-eating Birds in Western Australia’, Environment and History, 9(1): 31—52.

Schedvin, C.B. 1987. Shaping Science and Industry: A History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926—49. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Seddon, George 1995. ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’, Meanjin, 54(2), 290-301. Seddon, George 1997. Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Seddon, George 2002. ‘It’s only words’, in Bonyhady and Griffiths (ed), Words for Country: 245—53. Sherratt, Tim, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in

Australia, Sydney: Halstead Press in association with the National Museum of Australia. Smith, M. A. 1993. ‘Biogeography, Human Ecology and Prehistory in the Sandridge Deserts’, Australian

Archaeology, 37: 35—50. Smith, M. A. 2004. ‘Palaeoclimates: An archaeology of climate change’, in Sherratt, Griffiths and Robin

(eds), A Change in the Weather: chapter 15. Smith, Philippa Mein 2003 ‘New Zealand Federation Commissioners in Australia: One Past, Two

Historiographies’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 34, no. 122: 305—45. Spriggs, Matthew 2001. ‘Future Eaters in Australia, Future Eaters in the Pacific? Early Human Impacts’

Australian Archaeology 52: 53—9. Stannage, Tom 1996. Lakeside City: The Dreaming of Joondalup, Nedlands: University of Western

Australia Press. Star, Paul 2002 ‘Native Forests and the Rise of Preservation in New Zealand (1903—1913)’ Environment

and History, 8(3): 275—94. Star, Paul and Lynne Lochhead 2002. ‘Children of the Burnt Bush: New Zealanders and the Indigenous

Remnant’ in Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 119—35. Stine, Jeffrey K. and Joel A. Tarr 2000. ‘At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment

Updated with a postscript by the authors’, US Technology and Environmental History http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/ustechnology.htm

Strahan, Ronald 1979. Rare and Curious Specimens: An Illustrated History of the Australian Museum 1827–1979, Sydney: The Australian Museum.

Thomson, A. D. 1983. The Life and Correspondence of Leonard Cockayne, Christchurch: Caxton Press. Thomson, A. D. 1996. ‘Leonard Cockayne 1855—1934’, in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography,

Vol. 3, Wellington: Allen and Unwin/Department of Internal Affairs: 107—9. Tyrrell, Ian 1999. True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930,

Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

37

Walker, David 1999. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, St Lucia: University of Queensland

Press. Wasson, Robert and Aleksey Sidorchuk 2000. ‘History for soil conservation and catchment management’,

in Dovers (ed.) Environmental History and Policy, Melbourne: Oxford University Press: 97—117. Webster, Barbara and Steve Mullins 2003. ‘Nature, Progress and the “Disorderly” Fitzroy: The Vain Quest

for Queensland’s “Noblest Navigable River”, 1865—1965’, Environment and History, 9(3): 275—99.

Wynn, Graeme 1997. ‘Remapping Tutira: Contours in the Environmental History of New Zealand’, Journal of Historical Geography, 23(4): 418—46.

Wynn, Graeme 2002. ‘Destruction under the Guise of Improvement? The Forest, 1840—1920’, in Pawson and Brooking (ed), Environmental Histories of New Zealand: 100—18.